"Originally stemming from MeeGo, birthed under Nokia's watch, Sailfish has since gone its own way and is maturing into a mobile platform getting ready for launch. This week at the Mobile World Congress, we tracked down Jolla and Mosconi again, getting the opportunity in the process to check out a live Sailfish demo. We check out how notifications work, look at the Sailfish take on a status bar, and get to see the media player with all its gesture support." By far the most unique and interesting of the alternative mobile platforms. Very fancy.

The GUI stuff is the only new part of the OS - and that's what's cool. The rest of it is the rock-solid GNU/Linux foundation we know and love. It even uses Xorg! With the right configuration, you could make it start a regular X window manager on the secondary display when the phone detects an HDMI output, and since it's GNU/Linux it will take about ten minutes to port a desktop or terminal application. This is real convergence, not the "let's jam Unity onto a Dalvik-less Cyanogenmod and call it Linux" crap that Ubuntu is doing.

"you could make it start a regular X window manager on the secondary display when the phone detects an HDMI output, and since it's GNU/Linux it will take about ten minutes to port a desktop or terminal application."

I asked this recently elsewhere but didn't get an answer. Do you know if the hardware that's used in tablets actually supports a secondary HDMI display or if it can only clone the primary display?

Do you know if the hardware that's used in tablets actually supports a secondary HDMI display or if it can only clone the primary display?

If the device has an HDMI port then it is safe to say it can drive an HDMI display. But there are many other questions about the specific chipset, CPU/GPU, and other components before you could determine if it can drive its main display and the external display separately. I don't think there is any generic answer to your question.

If the device has a host mode enabled USB port (many newer tablets do) then it is quite possible to run a secondary display through the USB port.

Porting desktop apps to mobile devices usually involves rewriting the interface for the form factor. Many linux desktop apps are not written in a way where the UI is cleanly separated from the backend. So porting desktop apps to mobile may be more involved than you suggest. Also, most mobile linux distributions do not come with the libraries that are usually bundled on the desktop distributions. Getting those libraries on the mobile OS may be simple or tedious depending on the library.

I do not understand this popular claim that it is simple to port desktop apps to a mobile interface and form factor.

I do not agree with your opinion about the Ubuntu mobile effort but I will not get into that now.

"Porting desktop apps to mobile devices usually involves rewriting the interface for the form factor. Many linux desktop apps are not written in a way where the UI is cleanly separated from the backend. So porting desktop apps to mobile may be more involved than you suggest."

I think tidux'es concept of "port" was just to get the desktop/console software running on a tablet connected to an HDMI monitor and not necessarily to rewrite it for the tablet form factor. In this case he's probably right that it should be pretty trivial. The GNU toolchains might be underpowered running on a tablet, and a keyboard would be very helpful, but it should still work.